Bodies, emotions and tourism: a study of Costa Cruises commercials

Abstract

Nowadays, tourism industry proposes different opportunities to live a vacation where the body is the main interest and the central focus of experience. Each form of tourism shows a particular universe of representation of the body and a corresponding emotional language. In this context, where bodies and spaces are associated and reciprocally constructed as symbolic languages for the benefit of the tourist’s extraordinary experience, cruise tourism is an interesting case in point to analyze above all because on cruises, people use the space of the ship in different ways and, at the same time, following general corporeal and spatial schemes. These uses and schemes reflect a particular conception of the body, built through an interaction of different systems of representation, which transforms the ship into a real and true space for social aggregation or separation. The analysis we propose has a double methodological perspective: it is based, on the one hand, on a fieldwork accomplished on a ‘Costa Crociere’ cruise in the Mediterranean Sea; on the other hand, it is built on the meaning conveyed by different spot advertisements of the Costa website where the company suggest to the future passengers an exclusive experience. We will analyze these ads using a joint anthropology and linguistics approach. In particular, in order to analyze the chosen advertisements, a cognitive linguistics approach will be applied to show how the behavior of the passengers on the cruise is influenced by the linguistic choices of the spot advertisements that prefigure emotions.